The Importance of Structure and Process in Complex Organizations

Mike Downey: I think there's, this is also like a scale issue, right? That when companies get very large, like a company that you worked at, it's more fundamental that the people are more replaceable. But as you get down to smaller and smaller groups, I think changing out any of the individual members has more and more of an impact. He says if you have a thousand people working together, it's almost impossible to have one individual who is absolutely irreplaceable in that system. "There isn't an answer to this question that is separable from what level of complexity are you working at," he says.